Every minute of the past three years Shohei Ohtani spent on the baseball field was a gift. The most perfect ball-playing specimen ever to wear a uniform, simultaneously one of the best hitters and pitchers in a sport that for a century had demanded players choose one track or the other, Ohtani recalibrated what the game could be. He was baseball at its zenith. He is baseball, period.
What everyone took for granted, as he launched majestic home runs and unfurled unfair pitches, was the Faustian bargain underpinning it all — that as Ohtani trafficked in the impossible, he was relying on a wholly imperfect vessel to deliver it. Ohtani’s most formidable opponent was never the pitchers or hitters he faced. It was his body and its…
